


five times james asked and one time he answered

by lionheartland



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 5 times 1 time, AU, Abuse, Drabble, M/M, also because it sucks balls and im not talking bout snooker, happy birthday rach you utter asshole i should have just bought you a fucking muffin, hella hard to read because i write like tarantino giving GPS directions, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:02:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1891398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionheartland/pseuds/lionheartland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(alternatively titled; remember me better than i was)<br/>(birthday gift for the aforementioned rachel, terrible friend extraordinaire)<br/>(in which lily doesn't end up as gasoline for the jerk with a heart of gold, in which sirius offers him the matches without so much as a second thought, in which the world would consequentially burn and none of them'd be there to see it)<br/>(or, in which I put too many brackets and too little effort, as I don't even try to justify why I ship this or try anything at all)</p>
            </blockquote>





	five times james asked and one time he answered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evans17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evans17/gifts).



Everything opens and closes in front of this insolent boy, all dimples and cheap spectacles, a bundle of wishes too callow to confine and dark robes, already patched with the aftermaths of the ground. It reminds Sirius of the spring cleaning back at the Black manor, the home he just left behind - that place is now tucked somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow, a burying spot that isn't today because today he doesn't think - he _does_ think about Kreatcher shaking the curtains every spring, air thick with gossamer seeds and startled by the click of his mother's heels, about drawers mismatched and settled on the floor like a game of odd one out, about that public execution of secrets that happened each year and lasted two weeks. It only lasts two minutes now, but it's almost the same.

Sirius is a kid of the old millennium, a golden youth, molded from careful hand to careful hand then passed across tired ages, and he plays the Game with all the rest of the sacred boys and sacred girls, the Game where their eyes are russian domes and their hands are archipelagic relics, the Game where there isn't anything other than ironic quietude. Sirius is a drawer that has never been taken out for the imprint of dust, Sirius is still locked because the key is a legacy he hasn't received just yet. When he's older, then he'll know.

This boy is looking at him with the unadulterated superiority of the key keeper.

Your Game is rubbish, his hazel eyes seem to say, and those eyes are neither domes nor russian - they're alive with the things Sirius imagines they put in books, since nothing so dangerous can be evidently held outside of pages, they are both venerable and vulnerable in how much they know they'll see. They are the reason he looks away, half of a rejecting grimace stilling on his face, and fiddles with the monogrammed ring.

"James Potter, future Quidditch captain. Are you the _only_   Gryffindor that isn't happy to be a Gryffindor?"

* * *

 

Years later, he hates the Game and stopped playing it a while ago, even though disheveled pieces have glued to him like dough crumbs, and sometimes he says mudblood or sneers at chipped brooms and fraying boots, and at those times he can taste the tongue curling bitterness of disappointment, something unselfconscious and maybe not his altogether, but rather borrowed from a mild library of people he needs. The insolent boy is on his way to become Prongs, and he's joined by a recluse saint and a mousy follower, brought them into Sirius' life with the amoral nonchalance of a tornado, his every decision marking all four of them in a smile that spells 'regardless'.

James is a satirical statue or an event in itself or the pause at the end of the night where nothing is here and nothing is yours, but opposed to that, opposed to everything, he doesn't resent the few people who question his decisions - Remus has done all but cast him into a corner, and Sirius fought him and tricked him and won, the worse mistake anyone can make concerning Potter. He doesn't lead them and he doesn't possess them, or at least that's what they must have gathered, since they do finish their meals when James does and they mock Snivellus because somewhere in the great past and reason of things, it could have been due. Truth is, they all have doors only James can lead them through and they all have moments when they can't be their own persons. Maybe it's because they're afraid, and James isn't. Maybe it's because you can only love what doesn't know how to.

Before any of that, though, before wisps of darkness seep through the open lines and the murk raises to gather them all, before they all cling to something in order to brave the future and James settles on the most risky beacon of light, there still stands the matter of living. They have to stand before they fall, and Remus is limping.

Huddled at a common room table, with conspiratorial bowing heads and mouths clenched in concentration, James finally smacks his tongue through enlightenment. Sirius glances at him, opens and closes even after years, even after getting to know him like you'd know a worn coat, the sort his pureblood side despises, and he understands. He suddenly, abruptly understands why all his flaws fall short of the mark, why they're overlooked and overstepped and pushed across the room and under the bed. It's moments like these, where James can't do anything but be. Can't do anything but save.

"How does a map and a potion sound?"

* * *

 

His decline to play the Game changed the rules entirely, but the most maddening thing isn't the way it hurts and it isn't the way it lingers in the ripe soil of his head long after the bruises heal, it's the way he saw it coming and he sees it coming and that still doesn't move the outcome one inch. Nothing short of torture and no one calls it that way, he wouldn't if it happened to anyone else, it's fixating bad behavior and putting back in place, it's mending and adjusting and doing the only thing they know.

Those curtains Kreatcher hung out the window tore, and Orion Black is sewing them back together. _A woman's job, isn't it, father?_ Sometimes it's dillweed sauce at dinner and the enchanted record playing faintly, sometimes it's decent grades and pats on the back, it's family greetings and waltzing with Bella, warning Cissa and Andy that every wizard who wants to get them will have to get past him first. Other times it's Crucio and his belongings burning in the back yard, from where he can't even sense the smell of shriveling leather and decomposing plastic because his room is barred. The shackles are limp enough for him to feel the pain, despite all this. It's a whirlpool tightening in the back of his eyes, lodging itself into his throat, obstructing his nostrils and trading screams for mere winces, hints that he's choking, hints that he's learned.

One winter, when he's kissed so many insolent girls and even a few insolent boys - those one always in the archway's shadows, hands driven against their crude flesh, their towering bones, lips curling around the 'you must keep quiet' with that habitual air, abstract and absent as though he would ask for ice cubes - on that winter Sirius notices their recluse saint peering at him from under lashes dragging down. There's such a deserted ocean between the Gryffindor who didn't want to be a Gryffindor and this hunted boy, spending his time as a hunter man, picking moans and handfuls of foreign hair and muggle music discs and broken one sided goodbyes, that he doesn't understand how Remus can possibly believe he's been loving the same person all along. Yet, he does. And Sirius recognizes desire like a scarlet tie on the doorknob, a mark ready for him to hide his own marks under, it's his banner and his banish and he fucks Remus with his eyes closed while the other isn't even willing to blink so he wouldn't miss anything.

James finds him on his own and shirtless, staring at the rumpled sheets and shaking for the sake of a wide opened window. The stance of sex and winter coil together, the room is so impatient that it'd gathered up the stars, where they glided on the floor like memorial candles. If it's ever been a moment, this is it. And then Sirius remembers the bruises.

He's never heard James remain quiet for so long, and that's not an understatement as far as understatements go. Part of the Potter charm, like he's so often caught him saying, his friend talked so much meaning so little, in class and at Quidditch, when sleeping and when gobbling on a chocolate pie, midsummer or midnight. Now, the silence soaks them and keeps them awake, keeps them alive, it's their own fabricated spell, woven through the empty blanks none of them can fill, perhaps because it's too late or too early and that goes to more than the tongue of a clock. Sirius almost hears him sobbing, if he strains to listen, which he doesn't. Then, James coughs, a sound that's broken enough to make Sirius hate his parents for the first time. 

He has also never heard himself thinking that what his father did could have been wrong.

"Can I kill them for you?"

* * *

 

The Game is over and it brought some other things down with it, one way or another. Sirius wonders if his younger brother is still in front of the window, gazing at their alleyway even though it must have been pitchdark outside by this time, even if all Sirius ever owned is either packed either ashes, even if his owl Whitebeak is the only thing he'd left behind and likely dead already. Knowing Regulus, he probably is. Knowing their parents, it probably was.

There's a garden full of the stuff Sirius wonders about, wanders about, a savage garden - poison ivy keeping the good memories steady and red grape vines feeding on the bad ones because anger is better than fear and he'd rather break his teeth by gritting than by punching. But it's not anger and it's not fear that rings the bell, where an orderly storm of 'what ifs' nearly talks him out of it, and James crosses the threshold, fable grin by default, which freezes when he sees him. He thinks how he must look, dipped in the rain and the night, shrouded by an almost comfortable realization of mistakes, an almost reliable _brokeness_ , needy and disoriented and knowing all too well that he leaves James no choice.

Still, it's the understanding that surprises Sirius, the mechanical comprehending that James throws himself into, lets him stumble inside and tremble, opens and closes again, his own door this time, guides him upstairs and only halts a minute, pauses and breathes in as if how to handle this. The older boy realizes this precise moment isn't _his_ tragic family saga, it's James' coming of age story, it's the train of thought that nests within his friend and it bears as passenger a new reality entirely, something the future Quidditch captain never caught a glimpse of. Sirius can almost see it, the crosscountry thought. There's a world where people do this. There's a world where sons leave home with only a split lip and the horrible ache of guilt to show for it. There's a world where you can only see too much until it recoils back and shatters you. This world. How come it didn't touch me yet?

James looks over his shoulder to see him and his eyes still carry the acknowledgment he met for the first time, that their Game blows, but it's a sleeping infant, cradled in the shadow of its twin glint. _I never knew people could be this cruel, Sirius._

They are.

Something within himself is glad that it took James this long to get it, and something within himself is glad that his naivety was finally shaken.

We are.

He stands at the back of James' heels in the boy's bedroom and watches the scene as though it was a painting, dead end nature where James tries to recollect his own mind and his own spirit, preferably in the very same place. His fable grin returns.

"Left bed or the right bed?"

* * *

That autumn, the last one, everything at Hogwarts is rusted red. Past the leaves and the Gryffindor colors that had gotten so soothingly old, past the dried blood scrubbed by servile teachers, from the Quidditch pitch and the dueling grounds, from the hallways and the bathrooms - it's the only year where they're permitted to draw blood because fate twisted hard enough to allow that small piece of knowledge to make the difference between a winner and a corpse - past everything, red is the color of her hair.

Red is the almost visible, vivid color of James' words when he talks about her, the color of his cheeks after a chase, the color of his revenge on everyone she smiled at.

They're playing wizarding chess and Peter's adenoidal voice resonates in the common room, as he keeps insisting that Sirius has his wand up his sleeves (which he had), and James isn't dreamy and dreary for a change, he's chuckling his way through feint threats and nudges his arm. When Lily enters, the tension in the room stands at knife point, wavering and curling like a living thing, like their knowledge of James' feelings has received physical proportions, a conscious of its own.

Sirius' smile doesn't falter - no, it doesn't fade, doesn't shatter, doesn't soar to wherever smiles go when they leave. Dutifully, even if its possessor was that no more, it goes to sit behind a glass mirror, there for everyone to see through a trick of the eye, anatomical illusionist, conveying and convincing enough to smother any secondary doubts. And Prongs isn't sublte, but even if he did have that in him, the frail strength to lift the curtain, it now targeted a new direction entirely.

He knows beauty accounts for less than a part of it, because he remembers the way Remus loved (loves) the untouchable in him, the way he himself loves James (was it somehow ever a question?), the way they all design an ideal of greatness and half kill themselves with the sheer desire to reach it. Maybe people didn't love anyone really, merely versions of themselves when they were in the other's company, merely projections of childhood heroes and pit ladders. That's what he tells himself so he can bear looking, bear the simple thought of it. If that means his feelings are farcical, too, if that means everyone's feelings are farcical, then so be it. Every reality calls for different reasons to stand it.

Lily shoots them a passing glance, sharp like the wooden edge of an arrow, honest in its disinterest, in its narrowing eyes. Then, she turns and she's gone, knowingly away. James, at that, properly sighs. He leans on two elbows, flaring with something unseen by the rest of them, and shakes his tilted head.

"Isn't she wonderful?"

* * *

He's been getting ready for the past two hours and Sirius didn't miss a minute of it. He stood through the costume crisis, stood through the hair fit, stood through eight different perfumes, and now stands behind James as he stares at the door, like it may grow a mouth and claim it was a lie. Sirius likes to think he knew she would say yes to a date, sooner or later, but in all honesty, he didn't, and when he first heard, it didn't pierce through his hopes or stomped them, but rather left every piece of him waiting in a train station.

Remus is attending classes, all despite the fact that no one musters the power to care about something so trivial anymore, but Peter is here, and he's eying Sirius warily, arms wrapped around himself like a second jacket, propped on the top of the bed. _Stop looking, Wormtail._ For the longest time, he believed this ugly, fretting, grey spirited boy loved their friend as well, but now he realizes it was only admiration. Sardonically deceiving how for the most people it seemed the other way around, when Sirius doesn't admire James all that much - he can't look up to the thing he wants to drag down. Selfishness runs in the family is the easy way out. By now, he has learned to step up and call himself the bad guy regardless.

(There was this girl he met a year ago, or maybe two, where even an affair was a no go from the beginning - although catchy, she was ever blabbering about destiny and what is meant to be. In an unsettling way, Sirius recalls it now, knowing Lily isn't meant for James as much as he knows _they are_ still meant to be together, and the cause lies somewhere bigger than three students, bigger than what he wanted or what he was. Careful threading. The first step in starting to believe everything is believing in nothing).

James looks so hopeful and self satisfied, guilelessly nervous and bored at the same time - he tracked down the bird and wasn't that just the problem, killing the thrill - that Sirius cannot stop to prevent it. Perhaps, he thought, this is the exact thing the Game works against. Perhaps it would have been the very best to say "Gryffindors suck" on that one day, even if he knew no such language, nor the courage to use it. Perhaps in his rush to defy all the rules, he forgot that the world couldn't work without any.

James also looks so beautiful, that it reduces every fragment of Sirius' life to glass mirrors, glass mirrors, stepping out of one and into another, where the only common ground, the root that brought all pathways home, the base camp at the edge of the sky, was him. When James opens the door to leave, Sirius waits exactly five heartbeats to follow, and it isn't wistful romantics that makes him count it like that, but rather because it's everything he hears.

"Can you not go? Can't you quit her?"

Funny, he never thought about being kissed back, in the marrows of his mind, the empty throne rooms, the hollows where his imagination resided. Not out of modesty and not out of hopelessness, but it has simply always skipped that part. And yet, as Sirius grabs the hem of his shirt and kisses him wordless, James clings to the moment like it's both the only thing he didn't imagine and the only thing he did. When they find a wall, not an archway, Sirius ruins his hair and bites his tongue because why should the bastard have it easy, after he went through seven years of train stations?

In the near future, he'll hear about Alice and Frankie, their innocent son (as innocent as someone born under a vicious star can be) and he'll feel as if his past and his future were a sum of the same mistake, when the edges of that realization wrap around his fingers like the golden ring he'd given up, or the chains he'd unknowingly ran from. He won't discern that he changed the course of a small history, although he would have appreciated the irony that he did what his parents wanted all this time. In fact, when the news about the Longbottoms come, he'll probably be holding James' hand.

"Yeah", his insolent boy answers, without breath and without sense, as he pulls back from the kiss for just a moment. "I suppose I can."


End file.
